Cost and Scalability Analysis of Mobility Management Entities of NEMO

To support IP-mobility of networks in motion, IETF proposed Network Mobility (NEMO) protocol that uses various signaling messages to ensure connectivity of the mobile nodes with the Internet and to maintain security of ongoing sessions by protecting the binding updates. As the next-generation wireless / mobile network is supposed to be a unified network based on all-IP technology, compounded by the fact that the number of mobile nodes requiring mobility support has increased significantly, the cost analysis of mobility protocols and the underlying mobility management entities have become essential to avoid their performance degradation. However, there has been no comprehensive cost analysis of mobility protocol entities that considers all possible costs. In this paper, we have developed analytical models to estimate total costs of key mobility management entities of NEMO. We have presented numerical results to demonstrate the impact of network size, mobility rate, traffic rate and data volume on these costs. Our results show that a significant amount of resources (bandwidth, processing power, transmission power) are required by the mobility entities for transmission, processing of various signaling messages, as well as searching location database. Our cost analysis will thus help network engineers in estimating actual resource requirements for the key entities of the network in future design while optimizing network performance. Index Terms NEMO, mathematical modeling, cost analysis, mobility management entities, computer networks.